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A Brief History of Love is a strong, sometimes really, really good debut, and a nice addition to the shoegaze canon.
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For an outfit who've been heralded as the industry's great white hopes of 2009, The Big Pink undoubtedly have several moments of pure genius here, but ultimately, A Brief History Of Love lacks the consistency to elevate it from the status of a good debut album to that of a great one.
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It has been a long wait for a British album like this, the kind that transcends age group appeal and inspires cool kids to form bands and geeky kids to lose themselves in music's history.
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It’s this ability that makes The Big Pink so special for, beneath the dissonance, the artful posturing and the pop hooks is something far more enduring: these guys have got a soul and they’re not afraid to bare it.
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Their debut is built from old Chapterhouse records.
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A Brief History of Love is a study in the enormity of sound doing just that, each reverbed kick drum, phasers-on-stun guitar, and wastrel vocal refuting the idea that you need to talk about the passion to express it.
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The Big Pink’s A Brief History of Love will elicit a response of some kind. It’s just that kind of album.
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A Brief History of Love is a dazzlingly good debut, carefully mixing guitars and electronics in densely layered and carefully textured songs.
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A real carnival of a mess, completely inconsistent, sometimes really horrifying, and, more often than not, entertaining.
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Earthbound offering from hyped to the heavens duo.
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Its ambitions far exceed its ideas, and the record is sunk by the kind of sonic bloat normally reserved for self-regarding sophomore releases.
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Q MagazineWhat it lacks in orginality, it makes up for in sky-filling exhilaration. [Oct 2009, p.107]
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UncutThere's nothing quite as forward looking here. [Oct 2009, p.102]
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MojoA bleak and occasionally beautiful debut. [Oct 2009,p.102]
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Under The RadarA Brief History Of Love is a gloriously suffocating maelstrom of bass, guitar, and electro beats. [Fall 2009, p.61]
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This makes for a solid and sporadically impressive debut that next time could maybe stand to step out of the studio and let the raw force of their music stand on its own.
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The lyrics feel a bit tossed off, but they don't get in the way--that wall of fuzz is good for something.
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The Big Pink's A Brief History of Love is exactly the kind of album I wish had existed when I was 14. That's not a dig at the record; one of the more special things that a group can do musically is create a sound that appeals both to teenagers and adults.
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While A Brief History of Love isn’t quite capable of recapturing the rush upon hearing “Bittersweet Symphony” or “This is Music” for the first time, the Big Pink’s reverence towards those songs and their era and everything they represented is extremely well executed. And greatly appreciated.